As Boston activist Monica Cannon-Grant fights for justice in the murder of George Floyd and the many other victims of police brutality and racism that came before him, she acknowledged no amount of change will ever be enough for her to trust the system that allowed those things to happen.
“I’m a Black woman in America. I will never trust the police. No matter what,” said Cannon-Grant, the founder and CEO of Violence in Boston and the organizer of the recent peaceful protest in Dorchester’s Franklin Park.
She told Jim Braude on WGBH News’ Greater Boston Tuesday that reforms can’t erase the racism entrenched in the foundations of American policing.
“When you think about the origin of the police department, [it] was never to be created to protect and serve me, it was to capture and return slaves,” she explained.
Still, Cannon-Grant continues to fight for reform — something she’s been doing for years, through Violence in Boston and beyond. And she said she does see a difference in this wave of activism.
“Black folks are tired, we’re exhausted, we’re not taking it anymore,” said Cannon-Grant. “For a long time, Black people as a whole have been in a war we never showed up for. And I think now we’re showing up and we’re showing up in droves. And I think that’s the thing that’s changed this time.”
Six years before a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, prompting repeated cries of “I can’t breathe,” before he died — those were the last words of Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in Staten Island, New York in 2014.
As Cannon-Grant joined Greater Boston, she was on her way to meet Garner’s daughter and lay flowers on the spot where he died after New York state lawmakers passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which criminalizes the kind of police tactics that killed him.
The redistribution of police funds to other community resources is another “one of the paths out of this mess,” Cannon-Grant said. “You have to think, you cannot continuously decrease funding on prevention, decrease funding on alternatives, and think that we’re going to come to a positive solution.”
But it’s not enough just to address policing, without tackling systemic racial disparities in wealth, housing, healthcare and beyond, Cannon-Grant said.
“It’s similar to what you would do with cancer,” she said. “We have to eradicate it altogether.”
Ultimately, she does believe it can be done.
“Racism and hatred is taught and learned behavior, which means it can change,” she added.
